


You'll Be Just Fine

by Chanter



Series: Not Alone [3]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Accents, Acceptance, Alternate Universe, Anxiety, Developing Friendship, Discussion of Gender, Explicit Consent, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, Loneliness, Magic, Multilingualism, Nonlinear Narrative, Platonic Bed Sharing, Pre-Canon, Probable Canon Divergence, Superpowers, fun with French grammar, genderfluid Duusu, joy, magical transformation, mentions of colonialism, multicultural symbolism, nonhuman gender norms, peafowl!Émilie Agreste, spot the geeky references!, superpowered flight, touch starvation, Émilie unbroken
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2020-09-23 20:21:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20346145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chanter/pseuds/Chanter
Summary: Realizations, discoveries, mistakes and moments of awe in the early days of Duusu and Émilie's partnership.





	1. Chapter 1

Duusu is a remarkable creature in more ways than Émilie would have ever thought to expect. Example the first: 

Émilie would be lying to herself if she says she isn't nervous, showing her new friend her home - their? their home? does she dare go there yet? - for the first time. She closes the door, drops the handle of her suitcase, unzips her handbag all at once, all the way, and with considerable relieved relish (majority realities are what they are, and the truth of the cruelty she is demonstrably not inflicting on him is still going to take a while to really sink in) and... 

And Duusu zooms out, straight into the afternoon light. Émilie's insides do the double-time tango, without her consent, for approximately a second and a half. 

Her kwami takes in the flat via a midair circle turned wide about her head; the pale plaster of the walls and their adornments - the woodcut illustration of a rose done by an enthusiastic amateur friend and the bustling shoreside market town scene that's clearly a print rather than an original, the slightly lopsided archway to the small bedroom, the few popcorn speckles that came with the ceiling and stayed, the simple elegance of the sun-over-ocean curtains at the balcony door, the round wooden table and the too-shallow kitchen sink, the cheerfully mismatched colors of the silver and brass clock her parents gave her years ago, standing free on four spindly legs atop the crowded wooden bookshelf she's had since university and never replaced. The empty dish rack, waiting for a finished meal. The battered radio. The electric stove with the uneven back burner on the right. The sofa that doesn't sag, the threadbare mid grey carpet, the desk, slightly battered but clean, the scuffed leather wingback chair that may have been part of a set once, but isn't now. The quilt on the bed, just visible, a friendly riot of abstract shapes, patches of sewn sky and hand-stitched fe shade. 

The wobbly floor lamp. The silvertone chamberstick and single candle. The pink ribbon bookmarking a page in a nearly-shelved mystery novel - thank you, Jamillah. The bathroom mirror, the answering machine with a bright red number 8 displayed on its face, the lack of space for an upright piano. The dusty light fixtures, not yet glowing. 

And he beams. "It's beautiful! This is a wonderful home! Do you share it with anyone, or will it be only you and I here?" 

Émilie doesn't know how she isn't floating clear off the rug. 

Example the second: 

Somehow, some way, one very early day she opens her mouth and a variant of her new friend's name comes out. It's not a slip of the tongue or the vocal cords; not a hesitation, not a hiccup, not an anything - she's not misspeaking. It just... happens, like an unconscious shift into a dialect with which she has a reasonable familiarity, a tambre other than that with which she was raised, a novelty become natural usable extension. Only... that it isn't. 

It's far from her iffy Mandarin or even worse Tibetan, for one. For another, it's not a register she's in the habit of trying, needing or even meaning to use. She thinks it may have come from something old, in fact, something half-forgotten that she might have watched in translation as a child, and why it's revealing itself in her voice now - there were rocks everywhere, there was a doctor, and a baby; there were whistling arrows, and something... about a tear, or perhaps a tier, except both those words are English and this term, she's almost sure, was not. English doesn't, so her truly lackluster understanding of that language goes, generally pronounce its double vowels as two distinct sounds to any degree at all. So where...? She doesn't know. 

She has half a second, if that, to imagine her friend reacting with disgust or dismay to the elaboration of his name from two syllables to not quite three, to the subtle turn of it, the almost lyrical bent, lower-higher-lower, but phrases like 'mockery', 'trusted you' and 'I thought you liked me' barely get their chance to form before they're knocked into oblivion. 

He has, she'll think later, a truly marvelous tendency to do that to her. 

"Ooooh," her kwami says, "that's pretty! Is that my name in another language you know? Humans have so many; I don't recognize that variation." 

Émilie - stars in her eyes, and half of them formed of pure relief - ventures no explanation. Émilie has no adequate explanation. 

"I'm sorry," she says instead, honest and plain and pinking from hairline to collar, "I have no idea why that came out the way it did. It wasn't an error, but it's not a language I speak; it may not even be a language that exists. I--excuse me, mon nouvelle ami. I promise I wasn't mocking you." 

"I like it," Duusu proclaims simply. "It's like an accent. There are at least three other kwami I can think of right away whose names sound different in English than they do in French, or in Tibetan or Sumerian or Czech. Like this one." The paired two-syllable example he gives in the next second is pleasantly familiar in tone in French, but drawls subtly enough in English that it makes Émilie wonder if everyone everywhere could necessarily hear the difference on the first try. "It's the same idea to me. Both versions are my name. Both are right." 

Of course she keeps using it, after an endorsement like that. It takes more than a little fighting through hesitation to manage it at the start, but Duusu's reappearing, unfeigned grin at her makes that easier every time. 

Example the third: 

Duusu's suggestion sparks it off, and he's got a point; she should know what it's like, what she'll--they'll--be able to do, before a situation forces either of their metaphorical hands. He is, she's quickly coming to know, one to mean every bit of what he says. And she does trust him, more every day. And yet. 

"If you're--" she pauses, looks him full in the face rather than in the second headfeather, because don't be a coward, Émilie, and starts over. "If you're alright with it? I do not want," she rushes on before she can revisit those self-recriminations from the plane home from Lhasa, "to force a t-transformation--" and doesn't that sound surreal from her mouth, "--oh God, ... call, to call for a transformation you're not ready or willing--or both--to power for me. I mean if something vitally important is at stake and I realize it first, I might have to make a leap in a hurry? But please object if you need to? If you want to--if there's any reason, please, stop me? I do not want to be that person who takes advantage. I know you've said owner as well as holder and wielder, but I don't own you, mon ami. I don't know how much history you missed between now and--but there was Algérie, and half of east Asia, and Senégal, and Mali and Niger and Gabon and Dominique and really, sentients owning other sentients makes my conscience do the three-footed queasy conga all over my brain, and if..." She falters, closes her mouth before any more increasingly uneven babbling can fall out. 

"Émilie," Duusu says, soft but intent, and smiles full-on into her eyes. "You're being very thoughtful again. I like that about you. But please don't be frightened of hurting me with this? I want to transform you. I want to know what you look like with the powers I can give you. I want to see what you do with them." His voice is all quiet eagerness and no uncertainty at all, lilted upward with almost - dare she even think this? excitement? - and it's enough. 

"Okay," Émilie starts again, and if her palms are suddenly slickly icy and her ears are buzzing with a thousand cotton bees, at least her voice doesn't wobble too much on its way out. "Okay. Duusu--" Her friend nods, expectant and grinning, and Émilie leaps. "transform me!" 

That is, she just has time to think, the most gleeful, most ecstatic, tiniest shout she's ever heard--and the world rushes brilliant blue in a fuzz of friendly static electricity all over her skin. 

Oh. 

Oh! 

Émilie is suddenly, dizzily, forcefully grateful, as she bolts out of a standstill and dives through the fortuitously open door in the nearby wall, that she's not on an airplane. More air than expected stirs behind her as she skids to a stumbling halt on the bathroom tiles and she half-turns on reflex, so her first view of herself in costume isn't quite sideways, but neither is it profile. It's... 

She's... 

She's winged, tailed in wide plumage, and though the tailfeathers match her kwami's exactly - those are peacock eyes from Iraq, Jamillah the lighting tech's been telling them all Yazidi stories and Émilie counts her blessings for her own interest in listening to them - her wings are solid blue, bright but simple, in the way of peahens everywhere. He knows me, she thinks, hazy and glowing, we know each other. He knows me. Oh, Duusu. She turns fully to the mirror, beaming beneath her mask (it's blue too, solid and lightweight in what might be silk, might be something synthetic and patterned in tiny feathers, both eyed and self, from hairline to chin) and as she does, muscles she didn't know she had, possibly didn't have before shift over and around and beneath her shoulder blades. A moment's concentration and a single false start and the extension of her tailbone twitches to fanning life, opens, closes, opens again. "They're--" she starts, stops, and then can't help yelping aloud. "They're real! Oh my lord it's all real! They work! Oh, mon cher ami Duusu, I owe you so much." 

A glance down and over tells the rest; she's clothed neck to ankles to wrists in similar fabric to her mask, in a close-fitting suit of vivid blue dusted with feather patterns and scattered with a handful of gold and silver abstractions besides, each and every one incorporated into the design so thoroughly it could only have been spun there. Her boots are like her slim utility belt is like her gloves, sturdy and, in the first and third cases, probably leather, though where the last end at her knuckles, leaving the tips of her fingers bare and usable, the first come equipped with barely-there claws as gold as her kwami's own and the second holds an honest to God fan in place at her right hip. The wide, light scarf at her throat disappears beneath her hair, mask ties meeting extra security, but does not obscure the precious broach sparkling at her collar. She raises and lowers her wings once, twice. Turns on the spot, till she's framed in the washroom doorway and facing the living room's far wall. 

And glides on one brief downstroke, centimeters off the floor, in a shaky diagonal that ends in a clumsy landing just before her balcony's door. 

Squealing aloud and hugging herself in sheer glee the second after both feet hit the carpet might not be the most adultlike thing she's ever done, but just then, Émilie cares not at all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just as a heads up, Émilie is a little iffy about the overall of it/its/itself as a pronoun set in this chapter. She doesn't hesitate to use that set when a person confirms that's what they go by, but its otherwise not on her radar, and it shows. She's trying. 
> 
> If my centering of the ***s that indicate scene breaks is off, my apologies. Not sure how to fix that.

If you live with someone, you are bound to learn things about them, for better, worse, or occasionally just for laughs. 

*******

Duusu is starved for contact. 

Émilie realizes it the first full morning they're back in Paris - lifts a hand without thinking, palm down and careful, stops mid action, begins to trip over an apology for her almost intrusion on his space only to get entirely and comprehensively derailed by her kwami darting forward and up in what both looks and feels, hardly after the fact at all, achingly like both delight and desperation, to press the barely-there ridge of his spine almost millimeter by millimeter into the pads of her fingers. "Oh!" Émilie gasps, shocked through with a sudden, comprehending sympathy that snarls into the empathy of a lonely schoolgirl who knows better circumstances for the fortune they are, as she reaches out to cradle him in the cup of her opposite hand. "Mon ami. Oh, you dear." 

The rest is as much a foregone, two-sided conclusion as it is one easily drawn. 

She takes to - there's really no other word for it - petting him when they're not in company, running near-awestruck fingers over the near-down velvet of his skin, tracing delicate feather lengths with the lightest possible touch she can manage (she categorically refuses to get anywhere near to hurting him), soothing one or two fingertips slowly from bright head to magnificent tail. Not that he objects; quite the opposite. He delights in curling up at her collar whenever he can, clinging to her blouses and sweaters and unabashedly leaning into the junction of her neck and shoulder, perching on either knee, nuzzling her cheeks, falling asleep on the pillow beside her ear. It makes Émilie chuckle with bemused affection, because no fairy story ever mentioned reciprocated platonic tactility as a positive trait of its characters, and yet here they are, better and brighter than fiction. 

"I accept you, Duusu," she says. Says it once, twice, again. She gets into the gentle habit of repeating it during quiet evenings when they're the only people in her flat, usually after she's gone out with friends from work and had a few champagne coctails, and the world is pleasantly spinny and softly hazy about the edges as a result. Her kwami beams from the pillow near her head, or from his perch on the first knee he could reach, brighter and brighter with each repetition of the words, and there's an innocent, amazed joy in his eyes. Émilie strokes his feathers with light, deliberate care, up, down, over, up, down. I accept you, Duusu. I accept you. I accept you." 

*******

Duusu's pronouns are, usually, feminine. Usually. 

This does not mean always. 

"Other kwamis and humans usually do say she," her friend explains on their first night home - how the subject came up is a long and longer story in itself, and unimportant in comparison - and it's all Émilie can do not to wince at the mildly sheepish tone of voice in use, to say nothing of the chastizement that she's almost, almost certain she's imagining. "But I'm not... is the expression still 'to have an attachment to something', when it's a concept rather than an item? I'm not completely attached to people calling me she. I do like that, I do, but it's not the only marker I use, and--please don't feel guilty, Émilie please, you have nothing to feel guilty for--it's not the only marker I want to use." 

"Once," Duusu elaborates, and the sheepish vocal hints are all but gone, "when I was in New France, my wielder was absolutely certain I was a... the word she used was gentleman. I don't know that much about human males in quite a few different cultures, but she said my powers fit a classical definition she'd read." The blue kwami looks, for a second, frankly puzzled (if not a little flattered) before continuing. "And in Uruk on the River Buranuna, my chosen was galatur, neither a male nor a female human, and they thought I must be kurgarra, male and female at the same time. Maybe I am, a little?" 

"It seems like the ideas are different for most humans than they are for kwamis. Sometimes the attachment to one marker is strong - Wayzz is almost always he, Pollen and Tikki are almost always she, and Sass calls me she all the time - but it's..." A frown, an irritated feather rustle, and a midair shrug. 

"So--" Émilie opens her mouth, pauses, closes it, drags in a breath and tries again, blurts a confession before she can quake herself out of it. "I've been calling you mon ami," she says, low and honest, "mon kwami, all the way home, and I've been saying he just as long - thinking it, too. You--" she will not ask if her friend is sure, or second guess what she's just been told. She will not. The flash-remembered overhead lighting of an airplane bathroom is all the deterrent from that path she needs. "That's--that's right, for you?" Her voice comes out positively tiny on the last few words. 

"Yes, that's entirely right for me," Duusu assures her, and the smile he's suddenly wearing almost looks relieved amid its fondness. "Or she or they or all kinds of other things, but--" there's a hint of something softly wondering creeping into his expression now. "I like being called he, by you. I don't know why it fits so well, only that sometimes, and with some chosen, it does." 

Now it's Émilie's turn for a little awe. She's getting nearer to sure she was imagining that chastizement all the time. 

"Then he," she says, and her voice only shakes a little, with nerves, excitement, adrenaline or clumsy building confidence or what, she isn't sure, "you'll be, and mon ami - thank you. C'est toi mon kwami. C'est toi le beau bleu, la belle bleu. Le belle." That harmless bit of gramatical transgression, the tiny emphasis on the word she altered, makes her all-out grin. Duusu giggles. 

The wobbles had all but fallen out of her voice by the time she got to those terms of endearment, but they reemerge in the words that follow her seconds-long pause. "I've... always been she," is what she says, and the hesitancy in the admission feels as honest as it does strange. "No other variation has ever suited me." You silly thing, she thinks, there's nothing wrong with your brain and your body aligning, why ever would you-- 

"Then you're she," Duusu says, sure and clean as anything, and the ridiculous guilt drains away in one, evaporates in an interval of time too brief for Émilie to track and leaves no trace of itself as it vanishes. "Ma nouvelle amie was true before, and it's still true now. Ma amable amie," and now Duusu almost sounds as if he's testing out words. That or he's slightly drowsy. Maybe both. "Amie Émilie, ma Émilie, Miss Émilie." The last is chased by a breath that isn't quite a chuckle. 

"Maybe not that last one?" Émilie's own surprised amusement comes out as half laugh, half cough. "Unless you want to? I wouldn't ask it of you, but you can absolutely ask it of me." 

"... Maybe?" There's amusement there, but also something like uncertainty, or possibly just consideration. "Émilie, though." There's a pause, and when her kwami speaks again, there is absolutely something cautious in his words. "Émilie? There is one marker that I've never--the way you said it, suited you? One marker has never suited me. Some humans have a default reaction when they see a kwami for the first time--not 'it' for a pronoun, please? Not that you would react like that, you didn't when you found me and I can't see you starting to employ now... Only I'm not an it." 

If Émilie, as she suspects, only partially succeeds in stifling her wince at that one, Duusu doesn't call her on the reaction. "'It' is not a pronoun I generally use for anyone unless they ask me to," she assures him, and she at least manages not to sound too terribly emphatic about her answer. "To be honest, that's a pronoun I'm likely to use for someone only if they ask me to. If that's what a person prefers, of course--but it's not a... default, generally, when I think of people. Of sentients." 

Duusu is kind; he doesn't call her on the judgment, either. 

*******

"Is there any particular food you like especially?" Émilie's still a little breathless when she asks that question, fresh off both her first transformation and detransformation and still unable to stop beaming, arms wrapped around herself in almost convulsive excitement. "I know you've said you're not very picky and that you don't mind sharing meals with me, but is there? You deserve it, if there is something. After that--after... all of it. It's the least I can do for you." 

Duusu pauses midway through a midair somersault of his own and flips right side up with ease. "I don't mind sharing meals with you at all," he agrees, then hesitates. "There is one particular human food," he says slowly, "but I don't know how well-known or difficult to produce it is now. It was uncommon in my last holder's location; usually the elders had it. I really do enjoy it, but I don't want to cause problems for you if it's hard to find or strange for you to be seeking. It's called peanut butter. Have you heard of it?" 

The trip out of the flat that eventually follows this question, which involves first a walk to a local grocery, then a backcircle to the still-open corner bakery is, it's fair and more to say, delightful for everyone. 

There is, shortly thereafter, a package of emergency peanut butter crackers kept in Émilie's purse at all times.


	3. Chapter 3

It's the evening of one of their first handful of days together in Paris when the subject comes up as more than something theoretical, and stays. The generalities have long since been aired between them, first in rare, snatched moments alone in the trailer on set, and then in the otherwise unoccupied flat - this is what a kwami is, this is what a Miraculous is and how it should be used, and this is what powers (yes, truly!) are associated with both - but there hasn't been time for more, between the flights and the attendant unpacking, and the post-show letdown, and the joy of finally, finally being found again, and the grocery shopping, and the amazement, and the meal sharing, and the jet lag, and the new roommates adapting to each other, and the paying of utility bills, and the magic, and... 

"You can say transform me and detransform me if you want," Duusu explains. "You already know how that works--wheeeeee! I'm still so happy that you know how that works! .... Or, sorry, or you can use a second paired phrase, but that can vary - between wielders, not between transformations. Only one pair of specific keys will belong to a Miraculous holder, and what suits one chosen may not fit another at all. One of my wielders said feathers up and feathers down; for another it was fan out and fan in. The specific and the general keys will both work, whatever your words become." He pauses for just a fraction of a second, and then he full-out grins at her. "Like an accent!" 

Émilie's seconds-long splutter of surprised, delighted laughter was probably exactly the kind of result her kwami was aiming for, to judge by his smile. "You--you did that on purpose," she squeaks, shoulders shaking with fine tremors born as much of amusement as of unconscious tension lessening, "you marvelously crafty being!" She drags in a breath (not easy when you're still fighting giggles) and adds a heartfelt, if barely less wobbly, "Thank you. For knowing I was - thank you." 

Duusu is giggling too, but he makes no move whatsoever toward denial. "You're welcome! Your power will--ha! ... will only be triggered by one thing," he says, and he's mostly succeeded in controlling his laughter by the end of the sentence, though he's still bouncing subtly in midair. "It could be a single word, or it could be a phrase. It can vary. One language isn't like another, and neither is one wielder. I've heard of gestures serving as keys before, but none of my holders have ever used that mode." 

"I like half of the second example you gave," Émilie muses, "but really only half. The latter phrase it's connected to makes it sound like something's detached--eugh. I wonder if--rise, fall--no, that doesn't suit at all. Whew. Oh whew! Oh, wow." One startled, dismayed look is darted her kwami's way, but it morphs into visible relief when he's untouched by the unformed wording she's just discarded. Then, not entirely tentative, "Duusu? Could I try something? Would you mind? It may not even work..." 

Her words are feathers on and feathers off, in the end. No, Émilie admits, it's not the most original of ideas, but it works for her. It works for them. 

*******

It's a full day after her first transformation before she makes an attempt at flying in the open air. When she does try it, it's without once touching her tiny balcony's wrought iron rail, obvious entry point to the sky though that might be. That's a means of access as soon discarded as named; between the entirely understandable ideas a woman clambering onto or over a railing might give neighbors or passersby in the street below, never mind that the woman's in feathers, the fact she's a novice at using any of these skills, and the simple wish to avoid being spotted right away, she figures there are wiser routes she can take to usable airspace, and Duusu (quite vehemently) agrees. 

So she waits until night has well and truly fallen on Paris, streetlights and shops notwithstanding, before she calls her transformation, steps onto her balcony and acts on a variation of the first flight-related idea she ever had, all those hours--how can it only have been hours--ago. There's barely room to turn around on the platform, but there is space enough to extend both wings to their fullest, space enough to raise and lower them, and that's all she needs. 

One hard downstroke turns into two, turns into four, and by the time she's at eight she's cleared the level of her railing and the worst of the initial burst of terrified nerves has all but drained away, to be replaced by a building elation that has her beaming behind her mask again and trying not to flail for fear of throwing off her trajectory. From there it's a slow tilt forward into what she thinks is a slightly more aerodynamic attitude, one or two truly spectacular wobbles (and an embarrassingly loud squeak that even startles her when she emits it), a graaaaaadual turn around the near corner of the block of flats across the alley from her own, and-- 

And she's flying. Oh dear lord in heaven, she's flying. She's not unassisted - she'll never be unassisted when she does any of this, and the day she forgets that is the day she loses any claim to attempts at heroism - but she's abroad, on actual wings, in her city's winter sky. Her amazement and Duusu's joy are coursing like subaudible harmonies, shining, nearly rattling her teeth and bones as they combine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not the end of this particular story. I just figured the world, our world, could use a little joy, and so could the Not Alone 'verse. And so both 'verses get.

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone recognizes just what it was the tiny Émilie watched in translation and later remembered, you get a gold star of fantastic nerdery. :) Feel free to squee at me if you get the reference; I'll absolutely squee right back! 
> 
> I suspect this is chapter 1 of 3, possibly 4.


End file.
